2023

There are some songs you hear one way when the world is normal, and then life hits you in the chest, and you hear them a completely different way.

Billie Eilish’s What Was I Made For? was released in 2023 for Barbie: The Album.
It was written by Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell, produced by Finneas, with additional production and orchestral arrangement by Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt.

The song became the emotional heart of the movie, and for good reason.

Most people connect this song to identity, purpose, and trying to figure out who you are when the version of yourself you knew no longer fits.

Billie and Finneas have both talked about how writing it for Barbie also ended up reflecting their own feelings during a period when they felt creatively lost.
Billie even said they were in a season where they felt uninspired before the song came together.

But that is not how this song landed on me.

I took these lyrics harder than that.

Mercer died in my arms on June 2, 2023, at 1137 am.
The second his light left, his eyes I broke into a countless number of pieces. I really felt like he took a piece of me with him. I’ve had my heart broken before, but this was really different. I’ve had death in my life as well, but again, this was different.

When Mercer died, I used to listen to this song and wonder what I was made for because my dog was gone, and it hurt so bad.
I did not want to exist (anymore) without him.

He was my world, and he was gone.

I had never loved anyone or any pet as much as I loved Mercer.
Not even my husband. I had an ongoing joke with him and everybody else that I loved Mercer more than anything.

So when Billie asked, What was I made for, I was not hearing Barbie. I was hearing grief.
I was hearing emptiness.
I was hearing the kind of pain that makes you ask yourself questions with no good answers waiting on the other side.

That is exactly what happened to me with this song.

“That song leaves a lot of empty space in it, and when somebody is grieving, that space gets filled with loss.”

Take the first verses:
I used to float, now I just fall down
I used to know, but I’m not sure now
What I was made for
What was I made for?

That is why this song got under my skin the way it did.
It was soft, fragile, confused, and aching.
It felt like quiet grief.
Not the loud kind.
Not the dramatic kind.
The kind that sits on your chest when the house is still.
The kind that makes you feel like you are breathing, but not really living.

and then the chorus:
‘Cause I, I
I don’t know how to feel
But I wanna try
I don’t know how to feel
But someday, I might
Someday, I might

I know the song did not really support my exact feelings. I know Billie wrote it for Barbie, and I know it was meant to speak to identity, purpose, and becoming something more human.

But songs do what songs do.

Once they leave the artist, they belong to the people who need them.
Billie’s song may have started in one place, but for me it became something else entirely.

What was I made for, now that he was gone?
What was I made for?

That was the part that wrecked me.
And when you are grieving somebody you loved with your whole heart, it bleeds like your life.

I had to stop listening to this song because emotionally it was killing me on the inside. It was too beautiful, too tender, too close to what I was already feeling.

The other great thing about the moment it introduced me to therapy and counseling for my grief.

Sometimes a song does not comfort you. Sometimes it opens the wound back up and lets you look inside it again.

That was this song for me.

And maybe that is what makes it such a powerful song in the first place.
It can hold more than one meaning.
It can be about identity.
It can be about purpose.

And for some of us, it can become a song about love, loss, and trying to figure out how to keep existing after the heart has been broken open.

That was my truth with this one.

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